


Phase II

by ThePiningTrees



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU - desolate research facility, Attraction, Dark thriller, Derek volunteered for good reasons, Dubious Science, Ex Machina - Freeform, Flirting, Human subject research, M/M, Scientist Stiles Stilinski, Test subject!Derek, Unethical Experimentation, University student Stiles, currently a one-shot, sterek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 07:29:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15658596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThePiningTrees/pseuds/ThePiningTrees
Summary: Derek Hale strived to be a problem solver - finding loopholes rather than resigning in face of setbacks. When no university could afford or was willing to accommodate his ideas for research, he was at least allowed to look into other options. The private sector being one, but contract research organizations weren’t hiring PhD:s left and right.The alternative was, admittedly, a bit degrading but simultaneously genius - an opportunity for an inside look into the, hands down, most advanced research facility in the world.Derek was volunteering as a test subject.





	Phase II

**Author's Note:**

> Currently a one-shot because I’m an incredibly erradic poster and I don’t know when the next chapter will be out. Forgive me *crawls on bare knees*

 

The kid had clean-shaven cheeks and a rumpled, white dress shirt. Black, narrow tie, incorrectly twisted underneath the knot. Derek would’ve doubted this man had graduated high school much less had a PhD under his belt, if it wasn’t for the hint of square shoulders under the shirt, and the underarms beneath the sleeves covered in soft, dark hairs. And, the fact that Derek’s admission to the study depended on this squeak.  

  “Hello,” the young man said formally, and sat down.

There was a wet _slap!_ when the thick binder he had brought with him was discarded on the table.   

Derek sat up straighter. “…hello,” he repeated back, barely quelling the question mark at the end.

He usually was straight to the point when he spoke, or he liked to believe; when he had a question he simply asked. His sister accused him of being a man who spoke in capital letters when what he really was meant to say was hidden in the small octaves – a reference to their piano practicing days. Derek pushed thoughts of Laura to the side along with his impatience and endured the prolonged pause. The kid ran the interview – it wasn’t Derek’s place to break the silence by asking ‘How old are you?’.   

Long, elegant fingers fumbled with the pencil. Derek wondered if the black-framed glasses were just for show.

 The young man met his gaze hesitantly. “Uh. Do you have a name?”  

No introducing himself, no cliffnotes – ‘so this is basically what we are going to talk about for the following thirty minutes’ – no nothing. Derek’s gaze drifted to the security camera below the ceiling. It’s disclosed appearance in the room was strangely comforting – Derek was supposed to know he was being recorded. This was what he had signed up for. What he didn’t had signed up for was facing a stammering idiot. He scoffed.

  “Do you?”   

The young man looked at him for what to Derek seemed like another unnecessary long stretch of time – and waste of time. Then his naturally arched eyebrow scooted even further up, crinkling the skin.

 “Yes.”

The answer had a definitive period at the end, as if a one word sentence was something to be proud of. Two fingers tapped a nametag fastned on his shirt-pocket. Derek’s eyes narrowed. _Mieczyslaw Stilinski_ , it simply read.

 “Undergraduate?”

Derek couldn’t help but point that one out. The guy clearly needed someone to either take him down a peg or up several pegs – the jury was currently out. Outside the window, a slight drizzle began: Rain claiming the astonishing nature for its own. Derek wished he could walk to the window and take in the scenery of this place: the helicopter hadn’t made a victory lap around the premises before landing, but Derek had caught sight of a lot of pine and a breath-taking gorge, glittering water promising a lake at its bottom. 

Stilinski popped his glasses in place above his nose and turned to the window with a reproachful frown. He hadn’t explicitly ordered the rain to drop from the sky, his facial expression seem to convey – Derek covered up a smirk. He better give the kid what he was asking for, lest they were going to be stuck in the room for the rest of the evening.

  “Derek. Hale.”

“Derek. Derek Hale…”

There was a violent rustling of papers. Derek watched the kid flop pages until he got to the end of it, where he muttered something inaudible and dragged the tip of his pencil down the page to compare the admittance to the name printed beside the bottom line.

 “Hello, Derek,” he finally mumbled without looking up.

Derek held back a sigh. The guy probably didn’t give a single fuck about the person sitting in front of him, which was funny, because Derek was tempted to adopt the same approach.

On the other hand...the younger man looked kind of frayed at the edges already, and they were only two minutes in. A blotty rash was rapidly spreading around his throat, and if he hadn’t kept avoiding eye-contact constantly Derek would have said his eyes burned a bit too feverishly. He wondered if the researcher was apprehensive because he was scared of him. After all one of the various tattoos visible on Derek’s skin stated  _homo homini lupus est_ (man is a wolf and not a man, to another man he hasn’t met yet.) Chances were if Derek stopped teasing and baring his teeth so to speak, the kid would eventually relax. 

  “Protocol dictates that we review the remaining issues of confidentiality, sir,” the binder was gestured, “as well as privacy, test subject security and informed consent.”

Derek dead-panned him.

“I’m familiar with the process.”

  “Furthermore,” Stilinski soldiered on as if he hadn’t heard, “I should inform you that this specific site has required approval from risk management and legal departments.”

The Stilinski kid tried to stay professional – or he was determined to blindly repeat what they had taught him to say in preparation for these interviews – but Derek couldn’t help to feel annoyed. Mostly because he was threated as nothing but an outsider, a civilian. He had been practically breathing this scientific field for half a decade.

  “Why do I get the feeling it took you some time to gain those approvals?”

The joke fell flat. Or did it? At first Stiles didn’t move a muscle to show he appreciated the jovial tone or not.

  “I didn’t say approvals were...” he quited down and sucked in his bottom lip, contemplating a better answer.

  “I can tell you this much,” he admitted, mainly addressing a spot on the table between them, but it was an improvement. “The high-risk nature of patient safety did complicate things. In the beginning, but I can assure you that thorough investigative work by officers for Human Research Protections and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality-“ Derek watched the kid get blue in face from rabbling a sentence that long without drawing breath “-is on site and currently satisfied with the conditions here.”

He sank back to catch his breath, and Derek contemplated the speech in silence. Wow.

  “You really got yourself quite a career opportunity here,” he said, a hint of humility in his voice.

Stiles looked up from where he was apparently pinching a headache back into nose ridge.

 “There’s a lot of job to be done,” he admitted. The frames were off his face, giving Derek a clear path to his eyes. The color was a warm amber brown.

Derek hummed his partial understanding. They both seemed to measure, or re-evaluate, each other from across the table. Stiles pocketed his glasses behind the nametag.

  “Fuckers gives me nausea,” he mumbled, almost to himself. “Okay, where were we? Shit.” He watched as the disobedient binder slid from the table-top and hit the floor.

Derek watched him in turn.

  “Mish…slaw…fuck, Stilinski.” He called the kid’s attention. “I’m just gonna throw this out there, so it’s said, okay? You’re freaked out.”

The researcher snapped his head up. An earnest confusion sparked in his eyes. ”I am?”

  ”Yeah. You’re freaked out. Which is sort of contradictory because it should be me freaking out: the mountains, the gorge, this building in the middle of nowhere. I should be freaked out by you, by meeting you, having this conversation in this room, at this moment. Right? But I see you, and I kind of get that this is odd to you too. It’s new, and you got a lot of responsibility on your shoulders – this is cutting edge science, research that’s a hundred years before its time, if not more. You don’t want to screw up.”

There was an anguished, increasingly vulnerable sheen to those amber eyes, so Derek continued:

  “I get the moment you are having, but… dude, can we just get past that? Can we just be two guys? Derek, and…” he looked at the nametag in exasperation, _who the fuck names a kid Mieczyslaw Stilinski_ , “Stiles? Is that all right with you?”

He looked intently at the younger man’s face, daring him to dispute the everyman’s logic of his proposition. A voice inside his head berated him for risking his admission into the program. To his relief, Stiles exhaled a shuddering breath, disbelief mixed with what Derek hoped was mirth.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Yeah?”

 “Yes, uh… yeah.” Self-confidence seemed to return to Stilinski, along with the blood to his drained face. ”It’s good to meet you, uh, Derek. Do you mind if we leaf through these paragrafs?”

They checked off the conditions and questions in the binder in a reasonably relaxed mood. There was no clock in the room, and security had confiscated his wristwatch and phone when they arrived through the front entrance. Derek ignored his desire to ask Stiles what was scheduled after, and a thousand other questions meant to ground him in his surroundings.

 By the time they reached the personal information section, which Stiles somehow had managed to hold on to until the end, both men were reclining comfortably in their seats. Derek tensed a bit when Stiles informed him that they were now getting to the meaty part.

 ”Nothing too personal,” Stiles assured him, but when questions about parents and siblings had been answered, a change in atmosphere was detectable in the air. Derek watched how red spots began re-appearing on the kid’s cheeks.

  ”What?” he wanted to know.  

Stiles hummed in an effort to stall, dragging his blunt fingernail down the page. Perhaps in a patetic attempt to smudge the ink. “Um, what is your relationship status? Currently.”

Not a difficult question to answer, honestly. “Single.”

  “Uh-huh, gotcha. Any devil-spawn that you know or don’t know of?”

  “If you’re asking me if I have kids, the answer is no.”

Stiles ticked off another box. “And when was the last time… and when was.. uh, at which point in time, man…”

Derek raised his eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”

The moment was drawn out by his interviewer frantically chomping down on the pencil he was holding. The eraser-tip came off. He spit it out on the floor with a pop.  

  “Whenwasthelasttimeyouhadsexualintercourse,” came the hyperspeed question.

Derek scratched his cheek. These questions were a bit personal, he had do agree with Stiles. “Three weeks ago, it was a weekend. I remember because-“ he cut himself off, Stiles hadn’t asked about the specifics of the… intercourse… matters.

  “And…and…” by the breathlessness in his voice, Stiles was clearly struggling to get the next part out. Derek watched in horror as the younger man held out his hands from his body to demonstrate some sort of scale in the air in front of Derek: “On a continuum…how frequently…by approximation…”

  “Do I have sex? I don’t know how to answer that,” Derek said in earnest.

Not including the increasingly weird direction the conversation had taken, and the fact that the dumbass who was suppose to interview him from a neutral, professional point-of-view was loosing his shit, Derek’s sex life was erratic at best. He’d been single for most of his adult life. “I guess, once every other month, but probably less? Is that an answer?”  

  “YES. IT WILL DUE – AH-HA-HA!” Stiles exclaimed loudly and forcefully scribbled down the answer. “NEXT QUESTION.”

For a brief moment Derek was afraid that the next question would be ever more personal and Stiles was going to spew it out from the top of his lungs. The echo of Stiles rattling off ‘HOW FREQUENTLY DO YOU JERK OFF?’ would probably have the power to haunt his subconscious for decades. Mercifully neither was realized, and Stiles was wrapping up the meeting shortly after.

  “Is there anything you can say about what the study is about? "He finally said, when the last page was pushed towards him, along with the pencil he was meant to sign with. Derek touched his thumb over the faint bite-marks on it and tried to quench the sudden wave of second thoughts.

Stiles shook his head with a slight regret and a sympathy that hadn’t been there before. "It's too complicated to explain in a few sentences. You would hardly understand."

  “Try me. I’m hot on high-level abstraction.”

Tensing, Stiles stared at Derek's fingers, which were rolling the pencil back and forth, back and forth. Then he reached inside his pocket and held forth a black reservoir pen.

  “You better off signing with this.”

The pen between his slightly shaking fingers reminded Derek of a gun he was supposed to use on himself. A paranoid allegory, nothing else.

Stiles met his flicking gaze and there was a pause, then once again, the researcher fell back to repetitive, technical language. "The full aim of the studies are kept from the test subjects. I’m sure you are aware of the basic principles of a successful, uncontaminated trial."

At least he wasn’t being a dick by underestimating Derek’s intelligence. Derek sighed irritably and quickly scribbled his signature next to his name. They got up. Derek hesitated with his hand on the door handle.

   "Will all experiments consist of us sitting in a sterile room while you rattle off questions from questionnaires?"

Stiles turned, right hand's fingers still curled against the binder’s last page. With his upper body twisted by the waist, Derek got a better idea of his height and physique: the guy was in better physical shape than Derek had expected, with a flat stomach where the shirt was tucked in and narrow hips. The kid raise his chin and asked in his own defiant undertone:

  ”Would that be a problem?”

Stiles, Derek thought, acknowledging the nickname he had thrown out there. Stiles; maybe he was more fun to talk to when he finally relaxed.  

  “I rather have a beer and a conversation with you,” he said, already regretting how it came out. _Shit_.

He didn’t have time to register the reaction from the younger man, as a security guard awaited him in the hallway, ready to lead him to the sleeping quarters.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts?


End file.
